2026 Theses Doctoral

When Failure Becomes Social: Effects of Test-Failure Disclosure on Reputation, Motivation and Performance

Du, Yiran

Failure is not solely an internal psychological experience; it also functions as social information that carries implications for perceived competence and can shape how students believe others evaluate them, with downstream effects on motivation and behavior. Meanwhile, much of the existing research has examined isolated instances of “private vs. public” failure, often treating failure as a terminal outcome, and relying on self-reported measures.

This dissertation examined whether disclosing interim test failure to an evaluative audience changed students’ perceived academic reputation, impression-management motivation, academic engagement, and subsequent performance, beyond the effects of an evaluative system in which final performance is expected to be known by others. In a randomized experiment, 130 undergraduate students completed two practice tests and a final test consisting of difficult GRE-style verbal items. After each practice test, all participants received standardized false feedback indicating low scores and low percentile rank to induce a credible failure experience.

Participants were randomly assigned to (a) the Disclosure condition (practice-test scores described as shared with a program committee), or (b) the Control Condition (practice-test scores described as confidential). Critically, participants in both conditions expected that final-test performance would be disclosed and used for evaluation. Across pre-registered and supplementary analyses controlling for cultural background and fear of negative evaluation, the disclosure manipulation produced consistently null effects on perceived reputation, impression motivation, academic engagement (self-report and trace measures), and subsequent performance. These findings suggested that reputational threat may be largely driven by evaluative systems themselves,
and that incremental disclosure of interim failures may not be a primary driver of short-term academic motivation and achievement when students already expect visibility of final performance.